Hard Copy

The note is light blue. It’s about the size of a postcard. Am I at the wrong door? On further examination I see that this is definitely my door. The note is addressed to me. The message, which has been written in dark blue ink, feels like a threat. It’s only been a minute since I left to take my rubbish to the bin, but in that minute my reality has been reconfigured. That’s how quickly it can happen.

I live in a block of flats that once had another function, maybe as a care home, though I’m not exactly sure. It’s a building of long corridors, with a concrete stairwell, a lift and many small, identical studio flats, each with the same particle-board kitchen cabinets. There’s always a funny smell. You can’t just wander into the building off the street, or at least that’s what I used to think, back before someone put this note on my door.

There is a concierge in the building who uses little blue notes to communicate with the tenants. He sticks them on things that are blocking the corridor, all in the name of safety, of course. The concierge once told me about another building he used to work at. He was always insisting it was only a matter of time before it burnt down. Then a few months later it went up in flames. ‘Burnt to the ground!’ He looks you straight in the eye as he bellows this at you. Then he pauses. ‘Nobody dead or injured,’ he’ll always add, but only at the very end of the story, when you haven’t quite recovered from the shock. Anyway, what this story told me was that the concierge is always right. He takes his work very seriously, hence the notes. If you run into him he’ll remind you of any notes he’s left for you, and he won’t leave you alone until you’ve fixed the problem. He cares so deeply about the building that every breach of house rules feels like an insult, as if it’s his life you are endangering by leaving a chest of drawers in the hallway. He’s quite old, so it’s too late to talk him out of these egocentric convictions. He’d be a suffocatingly intrusive janitor if it wasn’t so sad.

And now there’s a blue note on my door. But I don’t think it was written by him, it doesn’t look like his handwriting (although that has grown shakier over the years), and it doesn’t sound like something he would say. He’s got a weird sense of humour, a real old man’s wit, but he’d never threaten me. The sticky note is just like the ones he uses, sky blue with dark specks of the paper’s fibres, and the pen that was used for this note resembles his pen, but the more I look at it the more certain I am. My concierge didn’t write this. I don’t know who did, and I don’t know what it means, exactly, but it makes me think that someone is watching me, and I don’t like that. Especially considering the parcel. Especially now that I’m on my own.

I still talk to my printer, I can tell him about this, but these days I’m only talking to him in my mind. It’s turned into an imaginary conversation, one-sided. I can’t see how he’s coping, I don’t hear the noises he’s making, I can’t read his reactions. It’s different. We have lost our connection, that’s just the way it is. I’m still talking, but now there’s no one to listen.

I try engaging my third eye to reassure myself instead, but I buried that long ago. I take some deep breaths. Nothing’s wrong, don’t worry. It’s just a little note, how bad can that be? You’re reading too much into it. Maybe it was posted on the wrong door, or maybe it’s completely innocent. My third eye would probably be telling me to keep both feet planted firmly on the ground, not to let my imagination run wild. There’s an explanation for everything. Think about the world you live in. About concrete things. About tangible reality. The world of IKEA furniture, of TV series people have been watching for years, of the special offer on raspberries at the supermarket. Think of those raspberries, of the card you have to scan to get the discount. Think of your little office with the wooden floorboards scratched by the desk chair’s wheels. Think about the sound a Coke Light makes when it’s cracked open. Think about the yellow pencils with those little pink erasers on the end that never really work. Think about small, clear-cut things. Do not think about ghosts or horoscopes or what exists between heaven and earth, don’t think about extra-terrestrial life, intuition, secret societies, don’t think about the most gruesome forms of danger: violence is an exception and will not happen to you. Don’t think too often about the universe as an entity, that’s not what it’s for. When you look up at the stars, think of that Vincent van Gogh painting and remember the sky is a view, meant for you. Don’t think of the fact that the sun is also a star, that every star is the centre of a solar system. That there may be dozens, if not thousands of planets just like Earth. Don’t think about infinity. The third eye would now be shouting at me, ‘THERE’S NOTHING WRONG!’ In most people, the contemplative third eye is much more powerful than their two primary eyes. Much more powerful than any of the other senses. More powerful than the pain in your stomach when something’s not right, when you’ve found a strange blue note stuck on your door.

When I moved to this city, I thought I could start over, leave everything behind. After all, I had done everything right. I’d almost forgotten about it, in fact. Not really forgotten, that’s impossible, but I’d pushed it so far away that it felt like forgetting. I managed to convince myself that my clean break was successful. Whenever I went back, because I sometimes did have to go there for special occasions, I was more or less considered a stranger, I looked weird and had a weird accent, and I saw that as confirmation that I had succeeded in cutting myself off. But pride is the first of the seven sins, and you know what they say about it.

The truth is, it’s impossible to cut yourself off. No matter how far away you move from home, even if you emigrate to Canada. You can try for years, and you will probably get better at pretending, most of the people you meet will believe you, but deep down you’ll always be the same. It’s internal, within you, the way you were made. The clay has already dried.

My room is different. Since I found that note on my door, there’s something in the air that wasn’t there before. A bar of sunlight lights up the floor. Slowly, very slowly, the dust drifts down. Dust consists, among other things, of specks of meteorites that have burnt up in the earth’s atmosphere. If only I had someone to talk to about that. My best friend texts me every now and then, but I’ve been ignoring her messages. She’s not the type of person I can share any of this with. I’ve been home quite a while, I have no idea how many weeks exactly. My leave of absence was extended. ‘Just to be sure,’ HR said. After a month I lost count. The hours fly by. I’m not sure what I do from one day to the next, but each one is over in no time. In the morning I’ll peer out the window, and before I know it it’s growing dark again. At first I would try to recap each day before going to sleep at night, but soon I stopped being able to do that because everything merged into one. In the outside world all kinds of things are happening: there’s breaking news and turmoil, babies are born and people die, the weather changes, buildings go up where before there was nothing, ships sail the oceans and aeroplanes draw contrails in the blue sky, a new planet is discovered orbiting Proxima Centauri. But in here I don’t really notice any of that. I know, somewhere in the back of my mind, that there are people doing things, real things. That there are people making a difference. But I can’t even imagine that those people belong to the same species as me.

After a series of uncomfortable conversations with my boss, HR and a company physician, I was found to be overstressed. It wasn’t until later, when I received the official documentation, that I discovered that my absence was referred to as being ‘put on leave’. But wait a minute, I thought when I read that. Isn’t that just for men? For the ones in the highest roles, who tell you: I can do this for you, but you’ll have to go to bed with me. Winking emoji. For men who send you a photo of their penis because it turns them on, there’s no other reason (stop looking for another reason). Surely, in that case, being put on leave isn’t for women? And then I wonder: am I the first woman ever to be put on leave? Being the first woman to accomplish something is a big deal, so really, I guess, this could be a good thing.

I do have to leave my room every now and then, to get my groceries and take out the rubbish, but I’m feeling increasingly concerned about who might be watching me. I wonder if there’s someone sitting in a car outside my building right now, spying on me through a pair of binoculars. Someone keeping track of when I leave the building and writing it down in his little notebook, so that he can sneak inside when I’m not there and leave a blue note on my door.

I have to stop thinking about that. Stress will only make things worse. I head for the cheap supermarket, the one that’s a twenty-minute walk away. I’ll try to spend the entire walk focusing on nothing except what I need to buy, nothing but my shopping list. The more slowly I move the better. Deep breath, open door. The moment I step outside my room I start to feel nervous. I’m scared I’ll meet someone in the hall. I take the stairs today instead of the lift, just in case. I run into a group of schoolkids who are smoking in the doorway. I think they can tell that I’m stressed, they seem restless when I walk by. Why are nerves contagious? I bet there’s some sort of evolutionary explanation. I hate evolutionary explanations. I don’t believe in them, and I don’t trust the people who suggest them. All they want is for the science of evolution to support their own culturally prescribed assumptions: women like pink because that’s the colour of the berries they picked in the hunter-gatherer era.

The greater the distance between me and my flat, the more I manage to convince myself things aren’t so bad. Maybe that note came from the concierge after all, he’s having a laugh at my expense, he’s the kind of man who would, it’s typical, really. And that package, which I’m sure contains something very dull, was just sent to the wrong address, maybe they still had our office’s old one somewhere, maybe there was a glitch in the system. That happens all the time these days, because of labour shortages in general and the exploitation of postal workers in particular.

I need to be mindful of my allergy, so I pause for a little rest on a bench along the canal. There’s a rat lurking in the vegetation on a muddy section of the embankment wall. A metre away, a white swan sits on her nest. Torn bits of bread are scattered around, some do-gooder wanted to do something good there. The rat waits for its chance, its pink tail twisted round the weeds on the wall. Then it leaps from the undergrowth, snatches a hunk of bread and darts away. The rat vanishes beneath a plank. The swan is still sitting there, unruffled.

The boy next door, Danny, the one who told us the secret, once bought two little rats from an older kid in the neighbourhood. They cost one guilder each. Danny proudly showed them to me and my best friend, they lived under his bed. Speedy Gonzalez and Mike. Speedy Gonzalez was a light brown animal that was good with people and liked to go sit on your shoulder, it would even clamber up on your head. Mike was timid and white. When Danny’s dad found out that his son had been keeping two rats under his bed for several days, Danny had to watch as his father beat them to death with a frying pan.

When I stand up I feel sick to my stomach. All of a sudden I’m certain that there’s someone following me. That he’s hiding a few metres away, behind a tree or in a tram stop, in disguise, ready to pounce.

It feels something like this: I’m being throttled by a thick, transparent coating of slime that’s covering our entire planet, and it’s only a matter of time before I suffocate. The layer does move, it may slide off in one direction and create an illusion of space and change, but it always comes back. It never goes away. It remains a dense, slippery mass that sucks everything into its vacuum. You can’t escape it even if you’re not on Earth (I’m sure people will still be thinking about their revenue models on Mars). The heavier the layer gets, the more I start doubting my experience of reality. If I see something suspicious happening in the train station, am I reading the situation correctly? If I hear someone yell Help!, do others hear it too? If someone accidentally touches me in the tram, if I hear music blasting from tinny speakers in the shopping mall, if I have to share a lift with a stranger, if the self-checkout doesn’t work and I have to go to the cashier, if someone walks past me on the train with a little note and a pack of tissues, do I behave the way I’m supposed to?

I cautiously resume my journey to the supermarket. At some point I’ll probably be so slow that people will stop seeing me as a human. ‘Hey,’ passers-by will say to one another, ‘did I see this here before? How funny.’ I do hear them, I’m still able to observe, but everything around me is moving much faster, it’s all happening in double-speed. The people overtaking me sound like Smurfs, sped-up and squeaky. Most of them manoeuvre their way around me without looking at me. Some tourists do stop and stare at me, for tourists see things the locals won’t notice. A few Americans want to take selfies with me, they think I’m a statue from Madame Tussaud’s that’s been put here as an advert. A couple of young students think I’m a piece of modern art, a hyper-realistic sculpture; they’re muttering stuff about Baudrillard, about the uncanny valley. ‘It always makes me feel a bit nauseous,’ says a girl with a pierced nose who is studying me with great care, ‘the way the hair and the wrinkles appear so real.’ I move like an island, drifting a couple of centimetres a year. No one has the time to really stop and think about anything (busy busy busy) except me. At night the high-pitched voices are gone, they’re all home or in a hotel room. I am still on my way. It’s as if I have all the time in the world, far more time than anyone else, I never have to hurry. I go at the slowest pace any living person has ever managed while others whizz by me. But faster isn’t necessarily smarter, I remind myself. The slower you go, the more alive you are, that is my life motto now. No one else hears that motto, because to their ears I am speaking in slow-motion, my voice so deep and drawn-out that it sounds like a noise from a horror film.

A while after the fire, somebody – maybe multiple people – took a can of yellow paint (nobody knows why it was yellow) and spray-painted a word on the front of the five-guilder man’s house, partly covering the front door. He left the neighbourhood soon after that. The police didn’t look into the vandalism because, frankly, they thought he probably deserved it. The word they sprayed on his house was one we used a lot. We used it to talk about creepy men in the street who’d look at us for too long, or male teachers we didn’t like, or Jehovah’s Witnesses. We thought it was a powerful word. Men seemed to be scared of it.

When I’ve done my shopping and am walking home, I pass the print shop. I gaze through the window and feel guilty. Then I’m interrupted by two people stumbling out of the bookshop next door. One of them is a grey-haired man with an unkempt beard; he is clutching a big blue plastic bag. At first it looks like a rubbish bag, but then I notice that the bag is full of books.

‘Go away!’ says the other man, a bookseller in a smart waistcoat. ‘We don’t want your stolen goods!’

‘The street belongs to everyone, fuck off yourself,’ says the man with the beard, who looks like someone the street belongs to more than anyone else.

‘We don’t buy stolen books!’ The bookseller turns to get back to his neat little shop.

A small group of people has gathered in a circle round the scene. I can’t get past without cutting through the arena, so I stop there too. The salesman, squaring his shoulders, is heading for the shop entrance. A half-eaten apple suddenly comes sailing through the air. Nobody was expecting that! The apple just misses the back of his head, crashes into the window, lands on the ground with a thud and rolls a few centimetres before coming to a stop. A hand grenade. I run for shelter, take cover behind a nearby glass door. The homeless man is still out there looking pleased, the bag of books clamped between his feet.

‘Did you just throw…’ says the bookseller, whose face has turned very red.

‘Oh, just fuck the hell off.’ He pauses a moment. ‘Little man.’ The homeless man gives his bag a kick and the books slide out. On top of the pile is the Iliad, bound in silk. The homeless man walks away slowly, weaving, as if he’s in a slalom. The spectators all step back to let him pass.

The bookseller is still standing outside his shop. He knows he can’t leave the bag, if books are just lying here for the taking then of course no one will buy a book in his shop ever again. The apple core is slowly going brown. People wait for the pavement to clear. Nobody says a word. The bookseller does not acknowledge his audience, very professional of him, he doesn’t care to break the fourth wall. He drags the bag with the books inside and drops it next to the counter. Everyone is watching him through the window. Then, shaking, he sits down behind the counter, disinfects his hands with gel, and sets the pin pad straight.

After this unfortunate series of events, I realise I’ve been sheltering behind the glass door of the Copyplaza print shop (an intervention from some higher power, it wasn’t my doing, I swear). Six large printers stand lined up, all in a row, each with a number on its front. The six corresponding computers are over on the other side of the shop. It smells of ink and warm paper in here, which is calming after the distressing incident between the homeless man and the bookseller. I am the only customer. The last time I was here, not very long ago, was when a German couple stopped me in the street. They were looking for a copy shop and I’d shown them how to get there. I guessed they needed to copy their passports, or perhaps to print out their boarding passes.

I said, ‘Of course, you don’t have one at the hotel!’ They nodded gratefully when I said I’d walk with them a stretch, it was just round the corner. They told me about their holiday plans. They kept giggling, which felt a bit odd. I did feel envious, they would have no qualms about walking carelessly into the print shop. I made myself stay outside.

They said something like, ‘What happens in [name of city] stays in [name of city]’, an in-joke that went straight over my head. It wasn’t until I’d stopped outside Copyplaza and they stared at me, confused, that I got it. They wanted a coffee shop. Not a copy shop. Of course! The German accent didn’t help. I was barely able to hide my disappointment. I pointed them in the direction of a cannabis shop the next street over and told them the fastest way to get there. ‘Have fun,’ I said, but I didn’t mean it.

Now that I’m actually in here, I don’t know why it ever felt like such a big deal to me. It’s just a shop. There are printers, computers and stacks of paper. It is neutral territory, maybe that should go without saying. And don’t get me wrong, they’re fascinating machines, advanced printers, certainly. But they’re not my machine. Not my printer.

How did it all start between the two of us? It was spontaneous, the way you might talk to a baby or a dog, even if you know it can’t answer you. In the beginning, when I first started this job, I had no idea that he might be listening, and it wasn’t until months later that I got it. I remember the moment clearly. It was early in the morning. I had just come up from downstairs, where I’d gone to get myself a cup of coffee. In the kitchen I’d found Sales and Office Manager sitting on a little bench, talking in low voices.

I said, ‘Hey, good morning, how are you?’

Sales looked at me, didn’t smile, and said, ‘Yeah, fine. Sorry, I’m just a bit grouchy.’

Office Manager didn’t smile either and said, ‘Fine.’ Then they turned to each other again and went on whispering.

I knew it was probably nothing to do with me, but back upstairs again, after I’d shut the door of my little office behind me, I found myself on the verge of tears. I took a few deep breaths, and that’s when I noticed. With each inhale, the printer made a sound too. Something was shifting about in there. I thought it was a coincidence, but when it happened a third time, I thought, No, he’s breathing along with me. Like a supportive husband puffing away next to his wife who’s in the midst of giving birth.

Now that I’m on leave and am no longer allowed in my little office, nothing matters that much anymore. Life is only interesting if you can share it with someone. I never used to understand why people were so obsessed with relationships, but that was before I had one of my own. People used to say to me, ‘Wait until you have someone,’ and I’d want to strangle them. Now it seems they were right. Without my printer, half the world no longer exists. Where I used to take note of every detail, everything’s now a bit vague. It makes it difficult to have intimate conversations, but I don’t want to have those with anyone except my printer anyway.

It wasn’t like I was constantly talking to my machine. Just occasionally. People talk to their pets all the time, to loved ones they’ve lost, to their plants. I’m not like one of those people in the street, talking loudly and gesticulating wildly, the kind of person you don’t make eye contact with, the one you can see coming from a mile away because people are moving uncomfortably away from them, someone you cross the street to avoid just to be on the safe side. Someone like that homeless guy, with his books and his apple. No, someone like that I am not.

Anyway, the way I see it, since the human heart beats only by the grace of tiny electric shocks, we too are machines. Human, animal, thing: they’re all arbitrary distinctions. A global emancipation movement will one day prove me right.

Why do people assume that there’s only one reality, and why do we all have to submit to it? What we see isn’t the only truth, there are all kinds of phenomena that defy our powers of observation, phenomena that refute our mathematical models, that radically shake our concept of logic. Why can’t I live like that? Our office, the space we share, is my magical circle, other than that I am not very hard to please. I don’t bother anyone and people don’t have to bother themselves with me. Didn’t I carry out my tasks and didn’t I do them well – wasn’t that enough? Nobody ever told me how I was supposed to do my job. They never said that I wasn’t allowed to talk to you out loud. My fantasy, if you must call it that, is an earthly fantasy, it’s far closer to real life than most other collective belief systems, like religion or monogamy (and people aren’t usually put on leave for those beliefs, may I add).

There are people who want to escape the chaos of city life by becoming shepherds. They want to work in nature, in the sunny countryside, with animals and plants, the sun and the moon. Long linen dresses at golden hour. They imagine a life of self-sustenance. They dream of long hikes through wooded hills, with a very tall walking stick, a sheepdog at their side and a knapsack over their shoulder. The herd follows them wherever they go, the sheep barely need looking after. From time to time they’ll stop for a rest, take out their pocketknife and carve artful patterns in their walking stick, take a bite of persimmon. With the money they’ve saved, some of these people will try to make their life a reality (carefully documenting it all on the internet, of course). Meanwhile the real shepherds, the ones in the south of Spain for example, race about in an old, polluting Jeep. That’s the easiest way for them to get around on the tricky terrain. They yell at their herd out of the window, and if the sheep won’t listen, they toot their horns until they obey. The echo reverberates between the hills.

The next day I venture out again. My employer has assigned me a career coach. They feel it’s time to start thinking about my recovery. The appointment will be held in the office, which is supposed to help me to begin my journey back to work, step by step. Attending these coaching sessions is the only way I will continue to receive a portion of my salary, the paperwork states. Today is my first appointment. I am still quite a long way from the office when my phone pings. Your meeting starts in 15 minutes. And that’s when I am run over.

I’m crossing a little bridge, the smell of the sewer wafting up from the canal, I’m glancing at the notification on my phone and so I don’t see anything coming. Later it occurs to me that I may have heard a beeping sound, but my mind was elsewhere, I missed the warning signal, so there’s no way the accident could have been avoided.

Something slams into the right side of my body, at hip level, and I sink down onto the cobblestones in slow motion, or at least that’s how it feels. I lie there quietly on my back for a few seconds, my hands somehow folded across my chest. Did I automatically clutch them together as I fell, or did that happen after, when I was flat on the ground? I stare at the sky and feel no pain. I think, Am I dead?

‘Oh shit, oh no, so sorry, are you all right?’ A man with a gold chain round his neck leans over me and stretches his hand out.

I grab hold of it. I’m not dead, just a little shaken. My elbows are skinned and they sting a bit. I sit up, and only then do I realize what’s happened, that I’ve been run over. The offending vehicle was a rubbish collector’s van. It’s small, with a silver, triangular bin in the back, brooms clamped to its sides, a cramped interior.

‘I’m so sorry, are you OK? Where are you going?’ The man with the gold chain, it turns out, is a garbage man, and he’s holding the passenger door open for me. I scoot in. We barely fit on the little grey seat, him behind the big steering wheel, me squashed up beside him. I see now that he’s wearing fluorescent orange overalls. I didn’t notice that before, back when I thought I was dead.

He drives me to the office. Weirdly, I feel comfortable sitting next to the garbage man. I’m not even worried about getting abducted. We zoom along the canals of the inner city and the narrow alleyways a normal car won’t fit through. The city looks like a stage set. Everything is swept clean. Where did all the litter go? Did this garbage man clean it all up? Now it’s so clean that I wonder if a set designer created it. It’s all here, the brick houses, the canal boats, the bollards along the pavement’s edge, the red-and-white checked tablecloths in the café on the corner. It’s all so effortless. Beauty attracts beauty, which is why in this part of the city everyone has straight, white teeth.

The garbage man asks if he can put some music on. I gaze out the window and listen to a voice that seems to be coming from another universe. We drive on in the direction of the office. Suddenly I know exactly what I need to do when I get there. The plan has just popped into my head, as if I’ve received clear instructions from some otherworldly presence. It might not be so easy, this mission, but I’ve got nothing to lose.

The garbage man always wanted to be a garbage man, even as a little boy. Dirt fascinated him, he never liked playing with toy cars, only with garbage trucks. His father thought it was silly, he wanted him to become an accountant, something in finance so that he’d get rich, but what’s there to do with money? Buy things. And what do you do with those things in the end? Throw them out. So.

He drops me off near the office. ‘Good luck,’ he says, as if he knows what I’m planning.

When I turn the corner, the office seems to have disappeared. The row of canal houses has slid shut, hiding the gap where it used to sit. Has it been picked up by a crane, or swallowed up by the other houses? Crushed flat, sucked down a sink hole? Wasn’t there a bell here before? Now, in the place of a wooden door, there’s a window masked with yellowing newspaper so that outsiders like me can’t peer in. The newspaper looks like it’s been there for years.

What’s happened? Is someone playing a joke on me? Maybe it’s like one of those tourist shops with the cheap baked goods, waffles and churros (huge mark-up) that suddenly appear out of nowhere, then disappear just as quickly. I look round again. The brown water, the canal houses, the elms. Yes, I recognize all of it. Just to be sure, I walk up the street, round the next corner, up another canal-lined street. Oh. It was the wrong canal. There’s the old wooden door. I plod towards it. Those canals do look alike: the water is the same shade of brown.

When I walk into the office building again after all this time, it looks pretty much the same as before. Of course, why should it look any different? These weeks of being on leave have felt like an eternity to me, but in office-time it’s probably gone by in a flash. The marble of the foyer (this is where the clients enter the building, which is why everything is clad in marble) looks as drab as ever. It smells the same too, of the same paper and the same cleaning product. The monotony of grey carpeting in the offices and corridors is broken up by the same old stains, the same old faded spots where the sun and the furniture have left their mark. On the walls are the same old posters in the same old frames. On the glass wall divider of one of the conference rooms, Post-it notes that have been stuck up for months are flaking off. In the kitchen the same rarely cleaned coffee machine is making the same sputtering noises. The same people (female colleagues) are loading the dirty cups belonging to the same other people (male colleagues) into the dishwasher, they’re the ones responsible for turning it on and getting it emptied. Some of the plants are a stage closer to death than they were when I still worked here, but that makes sense. Aren’t we all.

Through a half-open door I catch a glimpse of Product. He’s sitting at his desk, peering intently at his screen. Product always tries to do everything to the best of his ability. Before he buys something, he consults a price comparison website for savvy consumers so he can get the best deal. He swims a few laps of the pool every morning, he likes to give other people advice. He is sitting on an exercise ball, his back very straight.

A boy in my class at middle school had a swimming pool in the garden. That was his claim to fame. A classmate once had dinner at his house. He later told the whole class that everyone in the swimming pool family had to drink a big glass of water before dinner was served, in order to still the first pangs of hunger. Another boy in my class in primary school was called Hendrik, but he refused to listen to our teachers unless they addressed him as Hendrik The King. He made all our teachers call him Hendrik The King. He kept it up for an entire school year.

‘It really is nothing to be ashamed of, [my name],’ says the coach, who will probably be charging two hundred and fifty euros (excluding VAT) for this session. I know it’s nothing to be ashamed of, but even so I’m not going to tell him that I inadvertently found myself in the copy shop yesterday. I also won’t be telling him about my hunt for the package, about the trouble I went through to find something that, it turned out, wasn’t even ordered by us. I’ll say nothing about the note on the door. I’ll say nothing. I think about the garbage man and my plan.

‘It happens to the best of us,’ says the coach.

No, it is happening to me. Hardly the best of us.

I may be the only employee who’s ever been put on leave, but I’m not the only one with burnout, though I know they think it’s strange that I, of all people, could suffer from that. She got burnout from that job? Haha! As if someone who stacks shelves could get burnout! A waitress! A call centre worker! A cleaner! A receptionist! Society’s losers and their dumb little jobs!

My coach is in his early fifties, but he looks younger. He has dark curly hair and a museum pass. He is married, has two kids in primary school, and on weekends he heads for the beach to go surfing, rain or shine. He wasn’t always a career coach, he used to have a taxing job in the business sector which made him unhappy, so then he decided to have a career change. And then? Then he became happy. I know all this about him because he often uses his own life story to illustrate his views. He doesn’t understand me. He’s a man who is convinced that everyone’s career path must follow the pattern of personal development and growth. His hands are folded together on the desk as if he’s praying. After a long monologue about the meaning of my furlough (I can look at it as having some time for myself, less pressure, that I must rest in order to prevent serious, ‘deep’ burnout) he begins to talk about my plans for the future.

‘I would like to talk to you about your ambitions, your goals. Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?’

I don’t see myself anywhere in ten years’ time. I have no dreams for the future, I don’t have a single aim other than being reunited with my machine. I don’t want to improve myself. I just want to be. I did have a vague ambition once, and that was to leave the place I came from, which I did. Aside from that, I would like to accept my life just as it is (or the way it was before I was put on leave), and present it exactly that way to other people, if they ask, without excuses or explanations.

Since I haven’t given an answer, the coach is silent too. He’s waiting. After a very long pause he says, ‘Maybe that’s a tricky question. Ten years is a very long time, of course. Let’s put it this way: is there anything standing in your way that’s preventing you from achieving your goals?’

I think about the little blue note. About the package I risked my life to retrieve, the anonymous sender who might be out to get me. Is anything standing in my way? I’m silent again, this time for an even longer period. He doesn’t say anything either. I think I’m tiring him out, but he doesn’t let it show.

He tries a new tactic. Now he’s saying reassuring things and using the word ‘exciting’ a lot. There’s a website that lets you see how high the water level in your postcode will rise in the next forty years. In my neighbourhood it’s four metres. That’s exciting. I don’t share this thought with the coach. I could tell him that I’m worried about the environment, I guess, and then he’ll nod sympathetically and say, ‘We all are.’

He asks if I am interested in the customer service industry. ‘I know you like helping people.’ He looks at me insistently. ‘That’s a great place to start.’

I don’t want to record exactly what I’m doing and how much time I’ve set aside for it in my online calendar, I don’t want to go to the dentist on my lunch break, I don’t want office outings, I don’t want to have to rush around and I don’t want a company gym membership. I don’t want a slice of pizza when the company does well, I don’t want a Christmas hamper. But I can’t tell my coach any of this. If I do, I’ll never see my machine again. So I put my most normal foot forward. ‘I enjoy my work very much,’ I say. The coach looks startled. Maybe he’d already given up on me. ‘And I’m good at it.’

‘Oh! Well, that’s fantastic.’

I nod.

‘Can you tell me a bit more about the sorts of activities you find stimulating?’ He grips his notebook a little more firmly, pen at the ready.

I don’t dare say anything about the printer. ‘Well, lots of things.’ The printer is the only reason I like coming to the office. I take care of him all day long, dusting him, encouraging him, reassuring him, looking after him. I am there for him and he is there for me. I have more feelings for my printer than for anyone else, but I can’t say that to my coach. ‘Sometimes, as you may know, they’ll give me an extra task. Looking after the customer service inbox, for instance.’

‘Yes, excellent,’ he says. Now we’re getting somewhere, he thinks, I can tell from his eager posture. He’s frantically scribbling away, which I find puzzling, since I haven’t really said anything. ‘What did you learn from it?’

I hate the customer service inbox, I hate having to be courteous to unfriendly people. ‘Actually, like you said, yes. Helping people. That’s what I want.’

‘Yes, interesting.’ He nods in agreement as he returns to his notebook, jots down ‘HELPING’ and underlines it twice.

Coach, that isn’t what I want at all! I simply want to print and send out my letters, replace the cartridge every so often. I want to run my finger over the paper so I can tell if it’s fit for use, as I always do. I want to go up to my own little office every day and I want to be left alone in there. I want to switch on my printer in the morning and listen to its start-up sounds as I take my first sip of coffee from my mug, the same one I use every day, I want to spend all day with the machine, watch the printed letters stack up, I want to count the envelopes, categorize them and sort them into piles, print out the postage labels and stick them on, I want to see the sunlight patterns change on the wall of my office, I want to hear the noise in the street through the single-pane window. The sound of police sirens, a ringing bicycle bell, people laughing and talking, cars honking, a sliding door opening and closing, a scooter alarm in the distance, a tram in the next street, an aeroplane flying low overhead, raindrops against that same window. The building’s noises: the familiar creak of the floorboards, the sputtering of the coffee machine, the slamming of the front door, the sound of my office chair rolling across the old boards. Then, safe in my refuge, I want to spend the day with my machine, snug and happy.

A leadership course is a normal thing to have on your CV. When I got to university, I found myself in a cohort of fellow students, most of them eighteen-year-olds like me, who, without irony or embarrassment, were preparing themselves to become part of the establishment. As the dean welcomed us freshers, ‘Today’s students, tomorrow’s leaders’ was projected on a large screen behind his head. Not only did many of the students in the hall believe in that slogan, they aspired to it too, and now, almost ten years later, they are just as intent on joining the powers-that-be.

While the coach has been going on about himself, I’ve been working out how I’m going to do it. I’m proud of my plan, some movement in my life: finally, something is going to happen! I’m taking hold of the reins, or – how do you say it? I’m going to solve all my problems, and opening that box will be the first step in the right direction. The printer is too big to carry home, too heavy, he will have to stay here, but the package I can manage. My machine is patient, he’ll wait.

‘…And that ashram turned out to be enormously helpful for all three of us. Meditation is something I generally advise my clients to try. Sitting down with yourself, finding a moment to check in, asking: What am I feeling right now? In your case it’s about the mind just as much as the body. They can’t really be separated from one another, naturally. For your allergy, meditation might be the perfect solution.’ The coach is growing more and more enthusiastic. ‘There’s a remarkable number of alternative therapies, which goes to show how very little traditional medicine understands about allergies, whereas yoga and mindfulness can be enormously effective.’

This man doesn’t know a thing about me, and he doesn’t know a thing about my allergy. I regret ever mentioning it.

‘I’ll email you the name of the programme and a link, but you don’t have to sign up for an expensive course, don’t worry.’

I want to say, that’s lucky, I don’t have any money because I’ve been put on leave and have been getting by on a portion of what was already a meagre salary.

He stands up. ‘I’ll walk you to the door.’ His hand hovers in the air. I shake it.

It’s time to put my plan into practice. ‘Actually, I need to use the toilet.’

‘Oh. Well…’ He’s a bit taken aback. ‘You know where it is!’

‘But thanks so much, really. I really appreciate it.’ Together we make our way, step by step, into the hall. ‘I’ll start on the exercises as soon as I get home.’

The coach slaps his hands together and says, sincerely, ‘Fantastic to hear that, [my name].’ He steps into the office kitchen and I walk away. Part one of my plan is complete.

When I reach the toilets at the far end of the hall, next to the stairs, I open and close the door, making sure the click of the handle can be heard. Then I sneak across the marble to the staircase. The stairs are carpeted, dingy from all the feet that have trodden them. The fourth stair creaks, I know; years of training myself to negotiate the building as quietly as possible are finally coming in handy. If someone comes down the stairs now, I’ll have a problem. What should I say? I shouldn’t be here, I’m on leave, I even signed a statement saying so. I don’t have an excuse and, because I don’t automatically smile at people, I always look like I have something to hide.

Could my office be occupied by someone else? I don’t hear the printer, but that doesn’t mean much. Maybe someone wanted a secluded space for their deep work, somewhere they could concentrate. My little room would be ideal for that. If someone’s in there, what do I do? I’m almost at the top of the stairs when I hear a door open on the first floor. Quick! Back down! Is this too much stress for me? I take some calming breaths, try not to make a sound. I’m paused halfway up the winding staircase, out of sight of the person at the top as long as they don’t decide to make their way down. I’m trying to breathe as quietly as possible. If the coach were to step out of the kitchen with a cup of tea right this second, he would see me standing here, frozen on the fifth step. Maybe I could pretend I’m practising his meditation. The person up on the first floor has gone into another room. Now I have to be quick! I dart up the stairs as quietly as I can, take a few long strides to my office, grab the doorknob. It’s now or never.

My office is empty. There’s a layer of dust on the printer. Has no one touched him since I was last here? Is my job so expendable?

‘Don’t worry,’ I whisper softly. ‘I haven’t forgotten you.’ He’s just too heavy to lift, he could slip out of my arms at any moment. My head swims with panic at the thought. I won’t risk it. But maybe I can dust him with a rag, or write ‘I’m dirty’ in the dust with my finger? He would enjoy the joke. But if I wrote something funny my ex-colleagues would immediately know who did it, since nobody else in this office has a sense of humour.

The package is still exactly where I left it, waiting unopened on the desk. I know it’s heavy, but I am so used to it by now, it almost feels like a part of me, considering how much time I have spent with it, how painfully slowly I walked with it, clasping the box in both arms as if rocking a baby. It fit there perfectly. When I finally put it down, it felt as if I were surrendering a body part, and now it’s going to be reattached again. I’m not happy about it, this body part that drains me of my strength, might even make me ill, but it belongs to me, so I’ll just have to deal with it. I lift it into my arms. I have to use my elbow to push the door lever down. In four strides I’m back at the staircase, five seconds later I’m on the ground floor. Behind the kitchen door I hear the clinking of a teaspoon against a glass. Now I’ll have to be quick. I’m alert but not stressed. I tiptoe stealthily to the front door. I have the package, so I’ll finally have the answer. It’s very simple, all I have to do is open it, see what’s inside and find out who sent it.

The wooden door sticks. In the hall behind me I hear the click of the kitchen door’s lever. Someone is coming! I give the bottom of the door a kick. It swings open just in time, and one smooth move later we’re outside. The heavy wooden door falls shut behind me. It’s so hot out here, and I have at least a forty-five-minute walk ahead of me with this heavy box in my arms. I’m already sweaty, but I know I can do this, my body will comply. I have taken an important stride in my development, that’s how it feels. I have moved the goalposts. My career coach, if he really understood the situation – if he really knew me – would be proud to see me now.

When I get home my arms are burning, I am drenched in sweat, and the note is still there.

I once read a post on an online forum from a guy who’d found all these cryptic Post-it notes in his flat that were addressed to him. He was asking for help: there were no other signs of a break-in, all his belongings were still there and the front door was securely locked. Where had the mysterious notes come from? Could anyone tell him what they meant? In the end the hive mind decided that he should see a neurologist. They were right. It turned out that he had written the notes to himself and simply forgotten, there was something pressing on part of his brain, a benign tumour in his frontal lobe, causing paranoia and memory loss. He was sent to the hospital, had surgery, and a few months later there was a new comment on the thread: ‘Thanks all, I’m so happy I’m back to the old me!’

I go in, drop the package on the little table by the window. I wiped it down with a rag in preparation. The conditions have to be perfect, that’s important, because at least then I’ll know I’ve done all I can. I look out the window to make sure there’s no aeroplane leaving a white trail across the sky. That would disturb the symmetry of the moment, and I can’t have that right now.

I finally have the time and the focus of mind to take a good look at this package. It is a wooden box, wrapped in layers of plastic and see-through tape. There’s a label on it with my name and the wrong office address, nothing else. No logo, no return address, no brand name, nothing. From the outside there’s nothing to show where the package is from or what it could be. I finally rip off the packaging. That’s when I see that the lid of the box is attached with screws. I don’t own a screwdriver.

The next morning I take the early train to visit my mother. I don’t have time to stop at the hardware store to buy a screwdriver, so the package will remain unopened for another day. But what’s one day in a lifetime? I hate going to my mother’s house, but I promised I would, and the coach said, as if it was the most original advice in the world and he had just thought of it, that it would be a good idea for me to spend more time visiting family and friends. I feel my body weakening the closer I get. The place looks different every time I dream of it: sometimes it’s a labyrinth, sometimes a city in the desert, sometimes a dark field full of dying trees with a blue owl high up on a branch looking down on me. Still, I’m going. It takes three hours by train. The longer I sit in the carriage, which is getting emptier at each stop, the closer I am to a panic attack.

That street and that neighbourhood, the parking lot and the alleyways, they can only live in my memory, not in real life (even then, I’d prefer it if they didn’t live too vividly there either). In real life they no longer exist, not in this world, not in my life as it looks now. These places are places of the past, and they should stay there. Just the very idea of walking up that street makes me hot and dizzy, as if I’m sitting in the back row of an old coach that’s taking the tight bends on a winding mountain road too fast. This was a bad idea, I ought to stay far away. Why am I going there anyway, and why now? Everyone knows summer is the best time to visit this region. You’ll often find the residents in their little gardens then, if not round a barbecue. Are you visiting during or after an international football match? Then you’re in luck. You’ll find the street adorned with orange bunting, like the bared fangs of a yawning beast of prey. You may even spot local townspeople wearing traditional dress. But be warned! Unsolicited picture-taking of the locals is not welcome. Yes, it is true that a resident lost her life here after being stabbed fifty-two times, right, you read about it in the paper and yes, there’s still a bouquet outside her door. We aren’t going to get into it during the tour – no, sadly the police investigation is still open, so we’re unable to draw any conclusions yet. The temperature is just as hot here as elsewhere in town, so you won’t need to change your clothes. The currency is the same as well, although the only place to spend your holiday money is in a half-deserted corner shop. You can get something to eat at the snack bar: reasonably priced, simple, national cuisine. You wouldn’t be wrong to call this neighbourhood a diamond in the rough. And it’s precisely those rough edges that make it so rewarding to visit. It’s important to know that many of the residents have lived here all their lives. It is one of the few traditional areas still left in the city. We wouldn’t want its unspoilt character to be lost to gentrification, would we! That would be such a pity. These working-class council dwellings, their ceilings black with mould, their gardens overrun with weeds, give the people in other neighbourhoods (who, by the way, never set foot here) a feeling of authenticity. The feeling that they live in a real City with a capital C. That’s a good feeling. And we say yes to good feelings!

When I was young, if I told my mother something, she’d hardly ever understand what I meant. Her responses had little to do with my questions. If I was feeling poorly, she’d give me a rock crystal to put under my pillow at night. She’s been mostly alone for the past few years, I’m not sure what happened to the circle of friends she once had. She sits at her computer ordering things online almost all day long. She never opens the parcels when they arrive. The woman next door stops in every now and then, but my mum can’t stand her.

‘That woman…’ (that’s what she calls the neighbour) ‘that woman acts as if she’s worried about me, but really she’s just coming to see what she can steal.’

When I walk into her house it smells of patchouli oil. Every time I visit, the house seems to have got a bit smaller. We sit down at the table, around the fake tealight that sits in the middle. The plastic flame flickers. We eat sweet potatoes, that’s good energy, according to my mother. I don’t tell her I’ve been furloughed, I don’t mention the package, the note on my door. My mother doesn’t ask how I am. My grandmother never asked her how she was, and my grandmother’s mum never asked my grandmother, and the mother of my grandmother’s mum didn’t ask my grandmother’s mum either, and so on. So we eat in silence.

Did I tell you about that man in Central Station? The morning I took the train to go see my mother. In the big station hall there was a man lying on his side at the bottom of the escalator leading to Platform One. I could see him from a distance, people just walking on by. I thought: maybe he’s homeless. He was wearing a shabby brown jacket. A strange spot, really, for a homeless man to decide to stretch out, at the bottom of an escalator. When I got closer I saw that he wasn’t a homeless person, he was a man of about sixty, he could have been my father. He looked pale. I asked him how he was and he said, Not so good, darling, I was feeling a little light in the head. Just then station police arrived. They pushed me aside. But how long had he been lying there? Everyone had just been stepping around him. When are you supposed to look away, and when are you supposed to get involved? If someone might be dying, surely you should help? At night, returning from my mother’s house on the train, I saw the lights burning in the windows of the houses flashing by. They looked snug and cosy. I was the only one in the train compartment. I thought, it isn’t supposed to be like this. I am not supposed to be sitting on this train, not at this time, the time of day when people are sitting on the sofa together, I too belong inside a house with warm lights, I’m not supposed to arrive home to a tiny dark flat, a flat where, if I stay very quiet and don’t move, it feels as if there’s nothing there, like there’s no life at all.

A few days later I invite my best friend to the park. I need someone to talk to now that I can’t see my printer. Every day I sense his presence a little less, it feels increasingly like I’m talking into a void. I haven’t got round to buying a screwdriver for the package, but I have taken a few steps in the right direction (taken out my money, found out where the hardware store is located). A couple of things are stopping me from putting my plan into action. For example, how do I know what kind of screwdriver I need? I’m sure I’d only buy the wrong one, the difference between different screwdrivers is very subtle. And the hardware store is quite far away, will I have to take the bus? Which bus should I take, and how do I know someone won’t take the seat next to me on the little two-seater bench, spreading out and letting his knee touch mine?

The people in the park stroll past us. They’re all doing the same thing, all wearing the same thing, all holding the same coffee cup, and I just don’t understand how they all know how to follow the same rules. Does it get announced in the newspaper? I don’t have a subscription. I’m wearing my waterproof overalls. People are looking at me strangely. My best friend is much better at knowing what’s going on. She peers at everything from a distance, smoking a cigarette and observing like she’s looking at animals in a cage. She tosses her smouldering cigarette butt into a drain. If it was quiet, you’d have heard it hiss, but it isn’t quiet. Everyone is making mumbling sounds. Across from the bench, in the grass, lies a huge slab, a giant stone coin. It’s engraved with capital letters: YOU, NOW! I think I’m looking at things, but it’s really the other way round. The things are looking at me.

‘Jesus, just go and buy a screwdriver, take the note off your door. It’s probably nothing.’

I stare straight ahead, at the big stone sculpture. I, Now.

She lights another cigarette and keeps talking. ‘You just (inhales). Need (inhales deeper). To grow up (blows out). And sort it out.’

What I really want to ask her is if she thinks the package and note could have something to do with what we did, you know, back then, but I know she’d make fun of me for asking. It’s just like the supernatural: there’s a time and a place to talk about it, but it rarely happens that the time is now, the place here. Anyway, I know she’ll think I’ve lost it if I tell her my theory, that someone is watching me. It’s often like that with gut instincts: you can try to put them into words, but the words are always inadequate.

‘Look, you act like everyone else on Earth is made of plastic and you’re made of glass. But that’s not how it works.’ She takes another drag of her cigarette. ‘Here’s what I think: there are people who can go with the flow, people who do something, and there are people like you. You can wait for something to change, but that just isn’t going to happen, the world isn’t going to adapt itself to you.’

My best friend’s father walked out on the family when she was two. He found family life too stifling, like a cowboy who has to be free, has to be released, has to go his own way. At least that’s my best friend and her mum’s theory. They’re not actually sure why he left because they never saw him again.

‘Really, never?’ people will say, shocked. ‘But what if you wanted to get married? Would you invite him to your wedding anyway?’

What it comes down to, according to the psychology magazines: our formative years determine the rest of our life, and in the case of my best friend and me, those years left us warped and misshapen. Those years dictate how we will relate to other people in the future: lovers, relatives, authority figures, et cetera, and in our case, those relationships are completely skewed. All kinds of patterns and behaviours have unconsciously been drilled into our brains. You start off on the wrong foot, you adapt to it, and so your personality is built on shaky foundations. Ah, are you Pisces on top of everything? Ah, but then you’re an old soul, born before the children of Spring! Ah, that explains a lot, too.

A young man climbs on the big stone, lies down on it. He takes his phone from his pocket, chooses a song and puts it on speaker, places the phone with the tinny song next to his ear. A leaf drifts slowly from the nearest oak tree.

That summer, in the time before the car fire, my best friend and I head downtown. We stroll from her house, round the corner from mine, all the way to the centre. It’s July and very hot. We’ve seen each other almost every day this summer. Nobody in our class ever goes away on holiday. Some of the kids in our school do attend youth camp, a local politician’s passion project meant for a particular group of people on the lowest rung of society. (We didn’t know this at the time, we thought it was a normal thing that everyone did.) You could line dance, or paddle a canoe, build huts, that sort of thing. Anyway, we were too old for the camp. We usually hang out downtown or at the park, sometimes at the swimming pool. Today is the third day in a row the swimming pool has been closed because some kid tried to drown another kid. We don’t know why the pool has to be closed so long, since the boy survived. We take a different route to the centre that day. It isn’t until we are halfway there that we realize we’ve made a mistake, because this route takes us past the house where Christina lives. It’s too late to turn back without attracting notice. Christina is best friends with Danny’s sister Romy. Romy and Christina are two years older than us. Christina went to our school before she went off to secondary school. Last summer she was sent to prison because she and Dave, a sixteen-year-old from our neighbourhood, had tied up Dave’s ex. Or rather, Dave had tied her up, carved his name into her chest, poured petrol on her and threatened to light her on fire. Christina was there, but what she was accessory to we don’t know, maybe she was just sitting on the sofa watching TV as Dave was doing all of that stuff. In any case, Christina was charged and sent to prison. She’s back home now, though. We hurry past the house as quickly as we can, and to the end of the street.

When I enter my flat, sneaking past the note, my eyes are immediately drawn to the package. Does it look different? It seems different. I want to do something with it, and I don’t. I want to open it, and I want to keep it closed. I want to ignore it, but I can’t. When I go to the supermarket, I think I’m seeing the box on the shelves, and walking down the street I almost bump into it, as you might bump into a street lantern on a narrow strip of pavement. Why are things that are easy for other people so hard for me?

I’d love to stay in bed all day with the blankets pulled over my head. I could hide the package under a cloth so that I’d never have to look at it. I would be an Oblomov. I’d like that. But I can’t go through life like him. Oblomov had people to serve him coffee in bed on a silver tray. I, on the other hand, cannot afford that.

In the late afternoon I go out again, to the billiards club nearby. My best friend works here, but she’s busy with her work and not paying any attention to me. That doesn’t matter though, I just have to distract myself, that’s the conclusion I came to this afternoon.

In the pool hall there are eighteen billiard tables in two rows of nine. Each table has a dark green light fixture over it and next to it a narrow ledge where the players can leave their beers. It’s as if they plucked a few square metres out of eighteen identical pubs and neatly set them down here in a row. In the middle of the room, near the square bar, there’s a glass cubicle, like an enclosed bus shelter, where you’re allowed to smoke. It’s been against the law for ages, but the owner couldn’t care less. Every grey puff of cigarette smoke is sucked up into a silent exhaust system.

I sit down on a stool at the bar. At the billiard table closest to me a group of girls is starting a game. They must be around eighteen, I guess. Maybe they’re recent arrivals in the city, students at the university. It hasn’t been very long since they left their childhood behind, I can tell. They’re just the outline of what they’ll one day become.

The girls are good players, they take the game seriously. Maybe they come here every week. One of them arranges the billiard balls on the table exactly as they should be. One of the girls knocks the white ball into the rest of them. The triangle scatters in all directions. The girlfriends step back to give one another room, watch what’s happening in the game with rapt attention, every so often there’s a sudden burst of laughter. I’m sitting too far away to hear what they’re saying, did someone say something funny? Are they laughing about something more subtle, something about the game? They are young. A lot will happen to them. They have no idea, and neither do I.

We buy Chupa-Chups lollipops at the local snack bar. We make our way downtown. We sit down on the fountain edge and try to catch the men’s eyes as we lick the lollipops very slowly. Once we make eye contact, we try to keep it going as long as possible. Then, when some guy has the nerve to approach us, we jeer at him. Next we’re off to the chemist’s. I slip an eyeshadow palette into my jeans pocket (glittery powder, from beige to dark brown), my best friend lets two wands of mascara disappear into her purse, no way we’re paying for those, what’s the deal with mascara being so expensive? We chew gummies and mini peach rings straight from the pick’n’mix bins, we don’t even bother hiding it. It’s easy to steal makeup and sweets, but the sunglasses in the department store are harder, there’s a plastic gizmo clipped to the right-hand temple, you have to try to pry it off as inconspicuously and as quietly as you can. Now we’re sitting on the ground in a doorway, wearing our new sunglasses and smoking cigarettes, I took the pack from my mum’s handbag. We practise blowing rings. Next we visit the shopping centre, not for the shops but for the building itself. The levels are all stacked on top of each other and connected by escalators. Hanging over the railing, you have a great view of all the people below. You can walk endless laps round the tiers on the shiny white tiles, you can ride the escalators up and down, and before you know it, you’ve wasted another hour. (Being anywhere else but home, that’s the goal.) The basement level is nearly all vacant, there’s just a mostly empty variety store, most of whose varieties we’ve already shoplifted at least once, and a leather goods shop no one ever seems to visit, with a poster that says CLOSING DOWN SALE that’s been there for years. It looks deserted, but we feel someone is watching us.

Sitting at the bar, I sip my beer, staring into space. I think about how, in some way, everything is connected. Maybe I’m becoming a conspiracy theorist, they believe everything is connected too, don’t they? I don’t want to get fixated on my paranoia: as that one philosopher said, you can’t just assume there’s a connection between cause and effect. Looking down from above, you watch a train entering the tunnel, and a train exiting on the other side. But that doesn’t necessarily mean a train went through a tunnel. Maybe there were two trains, the first broke down in the middle, another one happened to be standing by in the tunnel, ready to take over from the first. It doesn’t have to be the same train. That same philosopher, I’m pretty sure, also said something about billiard balls, about one ball hitting another, and what that’s got to do with causality (nothing). So I guess you shouldn’t always put two and two together. Most of what we know is uncertain. The fact that we see a cause-and-effect relationship in the game of billiards says more about us than about reality.

The rules back then, when I was a different person: younger children, those who are really still little kids, are off-limits. Those ones you’re not allowed to threaten to make trip and fall, and you’re not allowed to slam their underdeveloped little heads against the stone wall of the school. Those you leave alone, they’re learning at camp how to line dance, and you act supportive when they show you the stuff they’ve learnt. If you’re about the same age, though, those rules no longer apply. If only there was a feeling of solidarity among us, how perfect and noble it would be! We’d join forces against the rest of the world, the world that has never been kind to us, we’d join forces against fathers with pepper spray and against teachers who lean over us too closely to see what we’ve written in our notebooks. But that’s not the way it works. We wage war in the street and in the classroom. We yank each other’s hair out by the handful, we call each other’s mums whores, we scratch each other with our razor-sharp fingernails, and everything turns into a contest: who’s the first to get braces, who’s the first to get her period, and who’s the first to be sexually assaulted.

The bar is closing. I hadn’t noticed someone is already mopping around my stool. Where did my best friend go? I’m the only one here, my bar stool is my little island in a sea of soapy water. If I leave, my footsteps will dirty the floor again! But I have to go. I’ll step into the ocean.

The lower level of the shopping centre is deserted, so how did these girls suddenly get here? There are three of them. They look a lot older than they are. Christina is standing opposite me. Way over to the right, the furthest away from me, I see Danny’s sister, Romy, who pretends not to recognize me. We can’t count on her to save us. I get it. It’s every girl for herself. Christina’s eyebrows look as if they are tattooed on, two fine black arches.

‘What are you looking at?’

I say nothing.

‘Hey, bitch, I asked you a question.’ She takes a step in my direction.

I try not to move. To my right, from the corner of my eye, I see my best friend. Her hand is slipping slowly into her pocket. She knows as I do that Christina and her friends once bashed a boy’s head in with a bicycle chain. They smashed up his face good, his teeth were scattered on the ground. He never pressed charges. I know what’s in my friend’s pocket. Sometimes, even though you’d rather not, you have to call on all the violence that’s bottled up inside you.

The next morning, I wake up to the sound of my doorbell ringing. It never rings.

‘Hello?’

It’s my neighbour from a few doors down. She’s standing outside my door, clearly in a panic. She looks about fifty. Her bleached-blonde hair is showing grey roots, she’s taller than average for a woman, and usually wears a dingy tracksuit. Her face is red and she’s fanning herself. Before even saying hello her hands go up to her mouth, as if she’s about to say something and wants to stop herself. The grey corridor seems deader than usual, in contrast to such an agitated, fidgety person. ‘I’ve locked myself out! And I don’t know how it happened. I went to go fetch the post from downstairs and left the door open as usual, but when I got back the door had slammed shut!’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘So you can’t get into your apartment?’

She’s talking so fast she can hardly get the words out. ‘No, no, I don’t have a spare key, and my phone’s inside, and my wallet, oh God, and I tried pushing and pulling, but it won’t budge, oh God.’

‘You can borrow my phone, we’ll call a locksmith.’ I am much more decisive with other people’s problems than my own. Maybe that’s a result of my customer service experience.

‘But how come the door just slammed shut?’ She looks at me wide-eyed. It’s the look of a big child. She’s helpless, waiting for me to answer. I find helplessness in adults very irritating.

‘Let’s go back to your apartment. We’ll try opening the door one more time, and if we can’t, we’ll call a locksmith.’

The neighbour nods feverishly, walks back up the corridor, stops in front of the closed door and rattles the handle. ‘You see! Completely shut!’

‘But,’ I say as cautiously as I can, ‘don’t you live at number 268?’

Now she too sees the number on the door. There’s a brief silence. ‘God! Yes…’

We proceed to the next door. That one is wide open.

‘Oh, how stupid of me, I could kick myself!’ The panic in her eyes hasn’t gone away, it looks like it’s growing worse. I try to reassure her, I say, oh well, it can happen to the best of us, but she can hear the insincerity in my voice. She looks as if she’s seen a ghost.

When I get back to my own flat and am again confronted with the little blue note, I think, in a rare moment of clarity: the neighbour! Why didn’t I think of it before! When I knock on her door, it takes a while before I hear shuffling sounds inside. I wonder what’s taking her so long, didn’t she only just go in? Isn’t her flat just as small as mine? The door opens just a crack, the neighbour stationing herself behind it, as if she’s trying to hide.

‘Hello,’ I say, as normally as I can. ‘Actually, I had something I wanted to ask you.’

‘Oh?’ she says suspiciously. She is always worried about being asked to do something. If the light in the corridor doesn’t work, she’ll tell everyone else to talk to the concierge but she’ll never do it herself. I just helped her find her flat, though, so she owes me a favour.

‘Uh, well. There’s been a little blue note stuck on my door for the past few days, and I wonder if by any chance you know who put it there?’

‘A note from the concierge?’

‘Well, so that’s my question, it does look like one of his notes, but the handwriting’s different.’

‘But only the concierge comes here, right?’

‘I thought maybe you saw who put it there?’

Panicked eyes. ‘But no one else ever comes here, do they? God, yes, there was a problem with the front door recently, it wouldn’t close properly…’ I can tell from her rattled expression that her brain is now being flooded with pictures of armed robbers, rapists and pyromaniacs, all out to get her. Her panic is reserved only for herself, it has nothing to do with my trouble. This wasn’t the intention! Must turn the subject back to me.

‘It also says something weird.’

‘Oh well. The concierge is a bit weird himself. Is it one of those little blue notes? I haven’t seen anything.’ She peers down the corridor to see if there’s anything more interesting happening out there.

‘Yes, but the handwriting’s different. This is more looped. And the writing is shaky.’ I don’t dare remove the note from my door to show her, that feels like I’m asking for bad karma, like a curse in a fairy tale.

The neighbour shakes her head. ‘It’s probably nothing, dear. That concierge is a funny one, isn’t he?’ She says ‘dear’, but it doesn’t sound friendly. She looks past me, disapproving and impatient. ‘Was there anything else?’

Oh, I want to say, so I have to act all sympathetic about your paranoid delusions, I have to comfort you when you can’t find your own apartment, but when I happen to be worried about something, something important, you can just brush it aside? But I don’t say it. ‘No.’

‘OK.’

I cross the corridor back to my room. Just before opening the door, I hear the neighbour call, ‘Also, did you notice the flap of the letterbox sticks sometimes? Someone really ought to come and take a look at it.’

Apparently there is always a low point, a rock-bottom. I thought I might have already reached it, but now there’s no doubt about it. From now on I’m just going to ignore the note completely, I am one hundred per cent sure it wasn’t written by my concierge, and I’m going to haul this package, I’m so done with this package, to the hardware store so that I’ll be completely and utterly sure I’m buying the right screwdriver, and then I’ll open the stupid thing right then and there so that I’ll finally know who or what is after me, and then I’ll track down that person or those people and yell in their face, the face I can no longer distinguish from any other body part, from the face or body of a person or a tailor’s dummy, from the environment, or animals, plants, buildings, objects, it’s all one big fog, I hate this cursed package and everyone who’s ever had anything to do with it.

It’s good that I’m at home alone, because now I can finally stop pretending. I can finally get mad. Even though all I was doing was sending emails, even though I was sitting behind a screen and clients couldn’t see my face, I was still forced to nod and smile constantly. I had to fake my smile so often that I forgot what my real smile looked like. I was always at somebody’s service. Did something bad happen, even if it was entirely your own fault? No problem, I’ll solve it for you! That’s what I’m here for! For you we will make an exception! Of course, glad to do it, and if there’s anything else I can help you with, please let me know! I learnt, as waiters do, that some people just love the power of knowing you have to do what they want. I bet they’re the kind of people who were slaveowners in a past life. I hate having to be compliant every day just because that’s what you have to do in this industry. (And all for something that wasn’t even officially part of my job description! Something I wasn’t even being paid for!) I hate being nice because you have to be, because you have no purpose otherwise, because if you don’t agree often enough with the person you’re talking to, there’ll be trouble. People will think you’re a threat. They won’t trust you. Every woman knows this. Take Lucia de B. for instance, the nurse who didn’t smile or chat with her colleagues enough: people were immediately convinced she’d murdered seven patients. Seven! To think you can get a life sentence for being socially awkward.

I’m standing at the edge of the canal with the package in my arms. It would be so satisfying to hurl it into the brown water. But when I try to picture it, the splash of the water, the plunge of the wooden box, the water gradually returning to stillness, I feel guilty. It isn’t really the package’s fault, is it? Just like the customers who send horrible emails to customer support: they are just unhappy people glued to their computers. Maybe no one ever cuddled them as a baby, so now they struggle to bond with other people.

Then I hear it – a beeping noise. I’ve heard it before, I’m sure, but this time the sound registers properly. When I turn, I see the garbage man, the one who ran me over a few days ago, waving at me through his little windscreen. He draws his van up next to me and asks, ‘Where are you going?’

There are still good people on this planet! Helpful and kind! ‘I have to go to the hardware store to buy a screwdriver.’ I climb in.

He needs to stop at a recycling point first. I want to go there too, I want to stay in this little van forever, the garbage man beside me, the sun shining through the windshield, the package on my lap.

‘What’s in it?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know. Someone sent it to me at my office address. Well, I mean, my office’s old address. But when the office was at that address, I wasn’t even working at the company yet. It’s very strange.’

‘Was it your birthday?’

Of course, I’d never considered that it could be a gift! ‘It doesn’t feel like a present.’

‘When’s your birthday?’ He glances at me, then turns his eyes back to the road.

I tell him. I’m worried he’ll start talking about horoscopes, but luckily he doesn’t.

‘That’s a pretty good day for a birthday.’

‘Yes.’

We drive on. It’s quite a long way to the recycling point. When we get there, the garbage man has to park the van in a particular spot so that it can be weighed. He is very interested in my work. I tell him about the printer. Our connection.

‘I know that might sound a bit strange,’ I say.

‘Oh, some people hug trees, don’t they?’ He smiles at me, looks at me, then looks back at the road. He doesn’t seem too alarmed by what I’ve said. It feels very natural to ride with him in this little van, as if I’m floating off somewhere, but at the same time I’m more present than ever.

There, in the shopping centre, was where my best friend and I saw Christina for the last time. She wasn’t around for the fire, for our rescue attempt. Danny and Romy weren’t there either. Now I think we didn’t expect them to be there, but at the time we really wished they would be. We’d hoped for a moment that Christina would be able to see the situation for what it was: that we had been doing something for her. That even though we didn’t like her, we wanted to help her, we wanted to take action. We wanted her to know that we knew about the five-guilder man, and that we were looking out for her. A temporary truce in the Girls’ War, which would begin with this fire. We were also, in turn, hoping for a moment when we’d see that she appreciated it, in an aloof, almost professional, way. A moment when she realized what had happened. Yes, the ultimate moment, really, when everything would come together. But things did not come together at all. They all happened separately. The five-guilder man did something. My best friend and I did something. Christina disappeared. We never saw each other again. Things happen independently of each other, over and over again, they are not necessarily connected at all. That’s what I need to remember.